Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

Church turned his attention back to the phone conversation that he was still contemplating, hours after it was over. He often packed up and headed home early, to see Ting and their daughter, Marie, who had recently turned seventeen. Of course, Marie understood when her parents’ hours were erratic. She had basically grown up in a laboratory, raised by scientists who saw her as the most wonderful experiment they’d ever conducted. For her second-birthday party, Ting and Church had lined up Petri dishes for all the kids to grow beans, with varying amounts of vitamins, to see the difference the nutrients made in the plants’ early life.

  Around that same time, Church had been experimenting with alginate/plaster casting. After noticing that his daughter often fell asleep gripping his thumb, he had used one of Marie’s sippy cups as a cast to create a synthetic version of his digit, down to the nail; then, when he traveled for work, a part of him always stayed behind to comfort her and help her sleep. On her third birthday, they’d made an alginate mold of Marie’s face. For her fifth-birthday party, they’d made flashlights out of LEDs, along with breadboard circuits.

  To the other kids in Marie’s classes, her father was a sort of mad scientist, complete with crazy beard and hair. She, too, knew her parents were special. Almost every night, the dinner table conversation reached Ph.D.-level sophistication. In the debates, Church and Ting would switch sides so fast that Marie had trouble keeping up. Sometimes, her father was the one with the outrageous ideas, but often her mother was as well. They took turns pushing each other higher and catching each other’s mistakes. From time to time, Marie would join in and push them both or catch them on inconsistencies.

  Although Marie and Ting wouldn’t find it unusual that he was still at the lab that night, Church wondered what they’d make of the phone call—Ting, especially, since her understanding of the biology that underlay the conversation rivaled Church’s own. She’d have known where Church’s mind would naturally go. Would she accelerate with him up into that stratosphere or yank them both back down to Earth?

  Church rose from his desk and turned toward the bookshelf that lined most of the back wall of his office. It took him a few minutes to find the handful of zoology textbooks he’d kept from his college years back at Duke. Most of them were dog-eared, the covers faded, and some of the information inside was surely outdated. He retrieved a couple of the more basic tomes and spread them out by the telephone, open to equivalent sections, on a specific species of animal.

  He sat back down, leafing through the various photos in the textbook, while reviewing the phone conversation again in his head.

  It wasn’t every day that a journalist called to ask Church to discuss performing a miracle—though it wasn’t as rare as one might think. In the past decade and a half, the Church Lab and the brilliant young scientists he had gathered there had pushed the boundaries of genetics, working on projects as diverse as genetically altered mosquitoes to combat malaria and bacteria edited at the cellular level to create powerful new materials. Church himself had authored hundreds of groundbreaking papers in all of the most prestigious scientific journals, and he had been awarded more than sixty patents covering many of his achievements. He’d cofounded more than a dozen companies and changed the practice of both genetic sequencing and genetic engineering.

  In theory, the majority of the projects under the Church Lab’s wide umbrella had to do with understanding and curing disease, but the ability to sequence and manipulate DNA—the building block of all life on Earth—had limitless applications. Church had been one of the earliest innovators to understand that genetic engineering could create changes in physical matter and physical life that could seem miraculous, given enough time and money.

  The Human Genome Project (HGP), which Church had helped originate, had been completed in 2003, in less than the fifteen years that had been projected, at the cost of around three billion dollars—as the scientists at the ski lodge had estimated. With the multiplex sequencing processes Church had further perfected during the last nineteen years, he now believed it would one day be possible to achieve similarly complex sequencing for a cost of a thousand dollars. The price, using Church’s process, was already less than a million dollars, and it would be in the tens of thousands within a handful of years. But the work could now be done in a fraction of the time.

  Church had also ventured into the new world of synthetic biology, in which scientists could sequence and then tailor simple life-forms such as bacteria to perform amazing, and sometimes useful, tasks. Bacteria could be programmed to glow like Christmas lights, to feed on waste, or even to act as biological fuel.

  Along with working in multiplex sequencing and synthetic biology, Church had launched another potentially world-changing venture in 2006: the Personal Genome Project. The PGP intended to take the Human Genome Project a step further—to make it useful to the individual. Rather than sequencing a single anonymous human genome, the PGP would sequence the genomes of a large number of volunteers and make those genomes public, along with medical records and other informational resources. Eventually, having a public database of genomes, along with medical profiles, would enable medicine to be developed to address illnesses or other conditions associated with specific genomic sequences—in other words, to allow physicians to tailor treatments to individual genomes and thereby treat or cure specific individual illnesses. The project would also push the sequencing technology forward, making it even cheaper and faster.

  Church himself had volunteered to be the first test subject of the PGP, allowing his own genome to be sequenced and put online for anyone to see. He’d already made his health records public. Every visit to the doctor went immediately online, along with blood tests, procedure records, and his nutritional habits. In aid of the PGP, Church was now, at the cellular level, an open book.

  Over the years, Church had grown used to fielding calls about his lab’s groundbreaking work, as well as informational queries from journalists working on stories about Church’s many colleagues and competitors in genetics. Church had always believed in making himself available; he felt strongly that science moved faster when it took place in the open, and the more he could help educate the public, the better it would be for everyone.

  So at first, he hadn’t been surprised to hear from Nicholas Wade, a well-known science writer from the New York Times, but he was surprised that Wade hadn’t called to discuss the Personal Genome Project, or any of Church’s other projects. Wade had called to talk about the Woolly Mammoth.

  Wade was working on an article about a team of scientists at Penn State who were about to publish a paper announcing an effort to decode the genetic material of one of the prehistoric creatures, culled from a hair sample they had retrieved from somewhere in the Arctic Circle. The scientists at Penn State believed that for around two million dollars, they could sequence the Mammoth.

  Church listened carefully to the reporter, already seeing where the conversation was likely to go. Church had toyed with this idea, had even discussed something like this two years earlier with a PBS film crew, but this conversation was pushing him to consider it as a real lab project. Church was not an expert, but as a zoology major and a fan of conservation in general, he knew a bit about the Woolly Mammoth. The iconic creature had mostly died out around ten thousand years ago, succumbing to some extent to changing environmental conditions at the end of the last ice age, and hunted to extinction by prehistoric humans. Over sixteen feet high at the shoulders and weighing over twenty tons, some of them were covered in long reddish hair. Despite the most common images in popular culture, Woolly Mammoths came in a variety of hair colors, similar to the variations found in humans. And Mammoths, unlike their future elephant relatives, had evolved a special hemoglobin that could function in cells very close to the freezing point for indefinite lengths of time. Their short ears and tails resisted frostbite, and they had been supremely well adapted to the cold environments of the Arctic and the northern steppes of Siberia and North America. But even so, they had gone ex
tinct. The last remaining handful lived on an island off the Russian coast three thousand years ago.

  In the mid-1800s, numerous Mammoth carcasses had been unearthed in the glacial regions above the Arctic Circle. As the globe continued to warm and the glaciers melted more quickly in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Mammoth finds accelerated. A handful of specimens had been discovered almost entirely intact.

  It was a fascinating topic, but Wade wasn’t calling to ask Church to weigh in on the Penn State efforts. To Wade, sequencing a frozen Woolly Mammoth wasn’t enough of a story for an article for the New York Times. He wanted to take it further.

  “Let’s say they’re successful,” he asked. “Let’s say they sequence the frozen material. Would it then be possible, using genomic engineering, to resurrect a Woolly Mammoth?”

  Church smiled slightly. This was exactly the sort of thing he loved—an intellectual game, one that probably wouldn’t lead anywhere concrete, but a mental thrill ride just the same.

  Like many other people, Church had read Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park and seen the movie based on it. He was unlike most other people, though, in that some of his own decoding of bits of bacterial DNA had made it into the laboratory scenes in the book as so-called dinosaur DNA. And unlike most people, he knew that Jurassic Park was pure science fiction.

  Cloning dinosaurs from genetic material harvested from a prehistoric mosquito caught in amber was impossible for many reasons. Dinosaurs had died out 65 million years ago, which meant there was no such thing as extant dinosaur DNA to be found in our modern era. No genetic material could survive even a fraction of that length of time. It would have been continuously bombarded by cosmic radiation or consumed by enzymes in the soil, which would destroy the DNA. No dinosaur fossils ever found had any genetic material. There was nothing at all to sequence. And no dinosaur fossil that would be found could contain any. An insect trapped in amber for millions of years became, at a cellular level, simply amber. It might look like a prehistoric insect, but it no longer contained any DNA.

  George considered it quite unlikely that the DNA of a 65-million-year-old dinosaur would be in any condition to sequence, let alone be cloned in a laboratory. That would require adequately intact cell nuclei.

  But the Woolly Mammoth was different. Woolly Mammoths were now being pulled from the Arctic ice in remarkably pristine condition, essentially flash frozen at the time of their deaths. And unlike dinosaurs, some of these Mammoths might be merely a few thousand years old.

  Still, despite the near-perfect appearances of some specimens of frozen Mammoths, attempts at growing live cells from the long-dead beasts had so far ended in failure. The DNA within the frozen cells had deteriorated over the centuries beneath the ice. In spite of science fiction writers’ imaginations, scientists were not likely to be regrowing extinct creatures in a lab any time soon.

  But Church wondered, what if you didn’t need to regrow a Mammoth from a deteriorating, frozen sample? What if, instead, you approached de-extinction the same way his lab was approaching his other genetic engineering projects—with rapidly sequenced genomes and synthetic modifications to cure disease or create new bacteria? What if you could take the code for what made a Woolly Mammoth a Woolly Mammoth and implant it into one of the Mammoth’s modern relatives?

  Church looked down at the zoology books he’d spread open across his desk. A half dozen pictures of elephants stared back at him from their jungle and savannah habitats in Africa and Asia. On the surface, they seemed far removed from their red, furry, cold-weather giant ancestors, who had once roamed the Siberian tundra. But were they really so far apart?

  Church hadn’t meant to give Nicholas Wade’s question a definitive answer. He certainly hadn’t intended to make any sort of announcement. He usually tried not to stick his neck out, but as an interdisciplinary scientist with a broad set of interests, Church was usually the one who got asked the crazy questions. And often, despite his best efforts, he gave the crazy answers. He always tried to be careful with journalists and to frame his answers with enough caveats to cover himself. Good journalists weren’t trying to be provocative, they were simply asking what was possible, what couldn’t be ruled out.

  But in answering Wade’s question about whether it could be possible to use genomic engineering on a sequenced Woolly Mammoth genome, Church had replied, “It’s certainly possible.”

  And right then, he’d known he’d just given a headline to the New York Times.

  Now, hours later, he was looking at pictures of elephants, his mind deep into what was still a theoretical game. His wife and daughter, having finished dinner, were likely heading to bed. Well, actually, Ting, being an insomniac, would surely be awake and ready to talk . . . about anything. Maybe their conversation would lead to a paper in a scientific journal, maybe it would become a thought exercise to get the hearts of the postdocs on the other side of the office door thumping. But Church was already spooling ahead.

  With the sequence to the Woolly Mammoth genome, Church believed he could synthesize and implant the proper DNA code into an elephant embryo, and essentially allow a modern elephant to give birth to its own ancient ancestor.

  Thirty years after Jurassic Park, you still couldn’t cultivate dinosaur DNA from amber, but you could, if you somehow had access to a dinosaur’s genome, create that same sequence of chemicals from scratch. You couldn’t bring a Woolly Mammoth back to life, but you could essentially create one. All you needed was that genetic code and a proper flesh-and-blood incubator.

  The first step was to collect the correct information. A sample of DNA didn’t have to be perfect, but it had to be good enough so that you could extract the important components of a Mammoth’s genetic code. To synthesize an extinct animal, you needed the proper recipe.

  And that was something Church wasn’t going to find in a high-tech Boston lab.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Early Spring 2009

  KOTELNY ISLAND, SIX HUNDRED MILES NORTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE.

  Timur Khan climbed off his Russian-built snowmobile and sank almost to his knees into a snowbank. His weathered features were shaded from the high midday sun by a thick hood made of cured yak leather. His twenty-year-old Tokarov rifle was slung high over his right shoulder, the aging wood of the hilt resting close to the ammo belt around his waist. In truth, the rifle was more for show than for any real sense of protection. Though Kotelny was one of the largest islands in the world based on land mass, the ice- and snow-covered outcropping situated deep in the Arctic Ocean was mostly barren wasteland. Aside from personnel at a Russian naval base that had only recently been reactivated, and at a scientific station that was deserted most of the time, the only people Timur might run into during his hunting expedition would be Yakuts like him. His tribe was small, and he’d certainly recognize any other hunters on sight. Most likely, he’d even be related to them.

  But he didn’t carry a gun for encounters with other hunters, Russian soldiers, or the odd scientist. As he ran a gloved hand over his ammo belt, Timur worried about the polar bears. Especially this time of year, when the snow and ice started to build again across the region, polar bears were particularly active. And even a new rifle, one that wasn’t twenty years old, or weathered by a lifetime of traversing ice floes and digging through snowbanks, wasn’t going to be much use against a polar bear.

  But the Yakuts were known for their courage in the face of danger. In his midfifties, Timur was not only experienced in the field, he came from a hunting lineage dating to the mid-eighteenth century, when the first Yakuts traveled north in search of better quarry.

  Nearly three hundred years later, the journey to Kotelny Island was still almost as treacherous as venturing onto its polar-bear-infested terrain. First, you had to cross the forty-mile bridge of ice that connected the island to the mainland: by foot, snowmobile, sometimes by armored ATV if you could bribe your way aboard one of the Russian military excursions, or by hydrofoil if you coul
d time your hunt with one of the rare scientific junkets to the Arctic station. Once you were on the island, you spent your time picking your way over dangerous ice floes that could crack or melt beneath your feet, past glacial boulders that came loose without warning. And at any time, you might encounter polar bears, who had been growing more aggressive every year, as the warming climate continued to shrink their natural habitats and limit their normal food supply.

  Timur himself knew of three hunters who had died in the past six months. Two of them were buried within a hundred yards of where he was now standing. The third hunter’s body had never been found, but Timur was certain his mutilated remains were hidden somewhere beneath the snow, ready to be unearthed with the next few digits’ rise on the Arctic thermometer.

  Polar bears or no, the one thing that Timur could count on was that no matter how treacherous the island, the hunters would continue to come. Before his tribe, the Yakuts of the Northern Sakha Republic, had hunted Kotelny, their ancestors had been nomadic hunters. In the Pleistocene Era, their quarry had been the great herbivores that had lived throughout the region, the caribou, bison, and reindeer that had provided sustenance. But now, the Yakuts’ quarry was quite different, and infinitely more valuable.

  Timur pulled his saddle pack off the snowmobile and slung it next to the old rifle. Within the pack were the tools of his trade: steel military shovels, ice picks, sealable sample containers, and a hand-drawn charcoal map. The map had been sketched by one of his cousins who had returned from an expedition to this very spot not three weeks earlier.

  Timur could still picture the moment when his cousin had returned to their village after that expedition, his prize—a large tusk—strapped across his back. Their entire family had gathered around as he’d carefully unwrapped the tusk. It was only partially intact, most of its surface covered in chips and cracks, but it had to be at least thirty pounds, and nearly three feet long from its tip to where it had broken off from what remained of the carcass.